POR: A Packet-Based Opportunistic Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, opportunistic routing protocol (Opportunistic Routing, OR) has aroused wide concern because it can improve the throughput and reliability in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) by taking full advantage of wireless link broadcast features. However, there is not any valid opportunistic routing for WSN applications. This paper proposes a lightweight distributed packet-based opportunistic routing mechanism, namely POR, which can effectively alleviate the inherent local unbalanced traffic load distribution in WSNs. The experimental results show that, POR improve the network aggregate throughput by nearly 15%, and reduce the transportation delay by nearly 75% in comparison with the existing opportunistic routing protocols.